A new understanding of love
Lately I’ve been contemplating love as an experience, a force, an embodiment, and so many other words that describe this feeling that I feel toward myself, as well as toward the other people who are meaningful and special to me. For so much of my life the word love has conjured up a combination of fairytale endings of happily ever after, questions as to why this feeling and experience isn’t providing that and wondering what it is about me and other people that hasn’t created a perfect fit. I never realized how toxic all of that was until I began my journey to self love.
The mythology of romantic love instills the idea that a person can get their needs met by someone else or more than one depending on how you approach relationship, but what I’ve come to recognize is that this is a myth. While the love of other people can be wonderful to experience, treating it as a cure all for how you feel about yourself does both you and the people in your life a disservice. Additionally it places a burden on the person or people in terms of fulfilling your needs and desires.
Ultimately, we are responsible for fulfilling our own needs and desires. In an ideal situation you might find someone whose needs and desires match your own and so you’re able to find satisfaction and fulfillment with each other because you are choosing, with consent, to meet each other’s needs and your own needs. Even in that situation, you’re still responsible for your own needs and desires. If the other person or people choose to meet your needs and desires, in part they are doing this to fulfill their owns and desires and taking responsibility for themselves.
I think its important to recognize what is or isn’t happening, and to realize that love with another person fundamentally still operates from a place of self-interest. Love is not a selfless emotion, but it is often treated as such in the mythology of romantic love and this creates a toxic expectation that the people in your life will sacrifice their own needs and wants to fulfill your needs and wants. While it is true that any relationship requires compromise, I think it’s also true that there can be situations where a person can’t or won’t be able to do an activity that the other person wants to do and in that situation, its important to exercise our capacity for compassion and understanding for the other person while also loving ourselves enough to speak up for needs and find viable alternatives.
My self love practice, both in thought and action, has taught me that I necessarily need to be responsible for my own needs and wants. As a result this has changed how I think of romantic love, and love in general. Love is a bonding feeling, that instills a sense of connection and helps people to survive a little more easily because of strength in numbers, but love for yourself teaches you to value and appreciate yourself from a place of empowerment. It teaches you to be reliant upon yourself, to choose yourself and to recognize the essential truth that love of any type is ultimately self-interest based love.
When we strip away the mythology of love and look at the reality of it, we are providing ourselves and each other and opportunity to consciously enter into relationship with an awareness of the respective need to take care of ourselves. This is not the view of love that people want to have, but it allows us to remove the co-dependent aspects of love that enforce the toxic mythology of romantic love. We enter into love with eyes open and from a place where a truly conscious relationship can be created with both ourselves and the people we choose to be with in this life.
